December 2018

International Migrants Day is a call to disseminate information on international migration and look toward further understanding its intersection with economic growth and socioeconomic wellbeing. Here we draw on data from the World Bank Gender Data Portal to highlight four big facts about women AND international migration. We focus on the “international migrant stock” which is the number of people born in a country other than that in which they live. Women, men, boys and girls experience migration differently. Accurate and timely sex-disaggregated data on international migration is critical for uncovering the specific needs and vulnerabilities of women and men and for shaping migration policy.

Globally, women are on the move: they comprise slightly less than half of all international, global migrants. In fact, the share of women among global, international migrants has only fallen slightly during the last three decades, from 49 percent in 1990 to 47 percent in 2017.

Better data, based on guidance from the Expert Group on Refugee and IDP Statistics, will help improve our support for the
displaced and their host communities.
Credit: Chisako Fukuda/World Bank

The record-high number of forcibly displaced people today—refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons (IDPs)—has underscored the need to improve the way the global community addresses these situations. The new global compact on refugees adopted at the UN General Assembly on December 17th will guide these efforts.

It is widely acknowledged that statistics are critical to inform our response, but until recently, there were no global standards. Lacking international guidance, different institutions produced data on forced displacement without due coordination or transparency. Terminology was inconsistent, making data incomparable. Statistical capacity varies between countries, and refugees and asylum seekers were not included in national censuses or regular migration and population statistics.

The World Bank data catalog is an ongoing effort to provide a “one-stop shop” for all Bank data related to development. That aspiration took a big step forward this week as we completed the addition of datasets from the World Bank’s ENERGYDATA.INFO platform. ENERGYDATA.INFO continues to provide public access to hundreds of datasets from over a dozen organizations on topics such as solar and wind measurement data, electricity transmission networks and energy access. Users may now search for and download those same datasets from the Bank-wide catalog.

This integration is similar to previous efforts to provide greater data access. The World Bank’s finances platform, microdata platform, and open data catalog have all been added to the data catalog. For data users and Bank staff alike, there is a clear benefit in being able to search and access all available data from a single online location. The data catalog also provides a consistent approach to data licensing, so users can understand which datasets are open data, which are subject to third-party terms, and which may carry other restrictions.

Shared prosperity is one of the World Bank Group’s Twin Goals, introduced in 2013. Progress toward this goal is monitored through an indicator that measures the annualized growth rate in average household per capita income or consumption among the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country (the bottom 40), where the bottom 40 are determined by their rank in household per capita income or consumption. Chapter 2 of the 2018 Poverty & Shared Prosperity Report provides an update on the recent mixed progress on shared prosperity around the world in about 2010-15.

The shared prosperity indicator was proposed as a means to shine a constant light on the poorest segments of the population in every country, irrespective of their level of development. Shared prosperity has no target or finish line, because the aim is to continuously improve well-being. In good times and in bad, in low and high-income economies alike, the bottom 40 percent of the population in each nation would be monitored. Tracking the bottom 40’s absolute growth as well as their growth relative to the mean is a way to remind us to always consider distributional impacts and strive for equitable outcomes.

An important but challenging goal to monitor

Despite its importance and universal relevance, shared prosperity is more challenging to monitor than global poverty. While one household survey is sufficient to calculate poverty, shared prosperity measurement requires two recent comparable surveys.

The implication of this stronger data requirement is that 91 out of the 164 economies with an international poverty rate measured in PovcalNet are included in the 6th edition of the Global Database of Shared Prosperity (GDSP).

Welcome!

This blog is a forum for discussing development data issues and open access to data. Open access to data is a key part of the World Bank's commitment to sharing our knowledge to improve people's lives.

Subscribe by email

E-mail: *

Enter your email to receive email notifications when new content is posted